Garren was frowning. “I’ll tell you some things,” he said. He lowered his voice a little, so that an orchestra from a dance club made more racket than his tongue. I got my chair a little closer.
“Dot Ellis knew you had some coin left,” he said. “That’s why she went up to see you. Don’t get a swelled head and think she sat around and waited.”
I swore. “Never figured that, Ben,” I said. “She got drunk on my liquor—two years ago. That’s why I shoved her out from behind the wheel, called a couple of witnesses liars, and stood her rap. She got drunk because I was going to tell her I was through. I wanted her to laugh it off—to tell me to go to hell. Was Cherulli hot for her just this afternoon?”
Ben shrugged. “You were up the river when she got the works,” he stated. “Was it Cherulli’s job?”
I groaned. “I haven’t been outside for two years, Ben,” I reminded him. “I wasn’t in a mob the last time I was out. Don’t ask me—tell me.”
He shook his head. “Donner was a pretty good kid, Mal. And there might have been a chance for Dot Ellis. Talking straight—Red Salmon is a hophead, but he didn’t do for Donner. Someone’s sucking them in, using them. Someone always is, Mal. The big ones riding the little ones—using ’em. I’ve had it—since I got out. It’s a fight—to even go half straight.”
I took my third, and commenced to feel the other two. They loosened my tongue up a little, but they didn’t deaden my brain any.
“I’m no damned philanthropist, Ben,” I said. “But I’ve got about seventy-five grand I’d like to use in my own way. I don’t like crooks much. You’re not my idea of a great guy, Garren. Let’s get it straight enough to make it count. You’re weak. A lot of little crooks are weak. I don’t like ’em—but I don’t hate ’em. It’s the big ones I hate—the breeders. The ones that suck in the little crooks—”
My voice was getting high and shaky. I got up, walked around, swore.
“Oh, hell!” I muttered. “You and Wirt Donner—you know how I feel. You knew up in the Big House. I haven’t changed any. I’ve had a number. I’ve got a record. Manslaughter. You can learn a lot in two years, Ben.”
I sat down again. Ben Garren scratched his head noisily.
“I think there’s a woman in it, Mal,” he said slowly. “Up high, I mean. Doing it right, get that. A man, too. But some of the stuff has the touch of a moll.”
I nodded. “It takes two of a kind to breed something,” I said slowly. “Crime’s like a lot of other things.”
Ben Garren grunted. “You’re talking too fast for me,” he stated. “All I know is they got a lot of half-decent guys. They’ll get more. What the hell do the bulls care? They make a show when they grab a hophead like Red.”
Some woman was singing a blues song. There wasn’t much static, and you could hear the clatter of dishes in the nightclub. Ben turned his head toward the radio.
“Sounds like Babe Mullens,” he said. “Cherulli was giving her a play. Big, nice-lined moll. Came out of Harlem to the glitter spots. Makes it and spends it. She can wail.”
I listened, and while I was doing that I saw Dot Ellis slumped in the cab. I got a flash of Wirt Donner pitching down the steps, hanging on to his stomach.
“What for?” I muttered. “They were in the way of something.”
Ben Garren looked at me almost sleepily. But he wasn’t sleeping. I got up.
“You’ll sit in with me,” I said. I didn’t ask it. “I’m going to find a hotel, get some sleep. In the morning I’ll fix the loose change so that I can use it. I’ll phone you—and when we meet don’t pack a rod.”
Ben looked disgusted. “I never packed one in my life,” he stated. “What in hell good are they?”
“For some people—they’re great,” I said. “By the way, know a woman that looks like this: pasty face, sharp features, dopey eyes? She’s around forty maybe not that old. Blond hair, but it was black. Still black close to her scalp. Lives in a boardinghouse over west of Sixth, on Fifty-sixth?”
Ben shook his head. “I’m off women,” he stated. “And I don’t like blonds. Why?”
I moved toward the door. “Figure it out,” I evaded. “I told you where she lived.”
Garren yawned. “I’ve heard of that dick Donelly,” he stated. “He’s a bright boy they pulled across from Brooklyn. He’s an old-timer, at that.”
I nodded. “He knew me,” I said. “And I got the idea the blond might have known Donner. You don’t place her?”
Ben shook his head. He came around and snapped the latch on the inside.
“I don’t figure we can do all our business in this town,” he said in a low voice. “Wherever we do it—there’ll be tough going.”
“There’ll be cigarette money,” I returned. “A drink now and then. It’s tough going right now, isn’t it?”
“You’re damn right!” he stated. “Talk foolish over the phone—I’ll spot the good words. Some stoolie might happen to be listening in.”
He opened the door. I told him that I figured a small store somewhere uptown would be the right place for him, and I wished him luck. He told me to remember him to the wife and kids. There was no one around to hear us, but that didn’t matter. I went down the stairs whistling. On the last flight I stopped. A key was turning in the lock of the entrance door. I started on down—the door opened a little. I whistled again. The door closed, and the woman turned around. She went out. I didn’t get a look at her face.
She turned toward the park, and didn’t look back when I was doing the same thing. I went toward Columbus, turned the corner southward. I stopped and lighted a cigarette. Then I got my face close to the corner of a store front and looked eastward on Sixty-seventh. I got a glimpse of the woman turning in toward the same flat house from which I’d scared her. She looked up and down the street for a second before she vanished from sight. Up toward the park there was a woman with a white dog.
I strolled back toward the odd number, went in, and tried the entrance door. It was locked. On the top floor, left, one H. Smitz lived. The card showed that. I pressed the bell. The lock didn’t tick. The other top-floor card showed G. Blum. I tried that—and the lock ticked right away. I went in, but I didn’t climb the stairs.
A door opened up above—after a while it slammed again. I waited about five minutes, then climbed three flights of stairs. The radio in Ben Garren’s flat was still going, but it wasn’t so loud now. Ben was talking. At intervals I caught words. He was swearing at someone. He was saying: “Jeez—cut it out, will you? Jeez—he was a bum! Jeez—what did you come up here for, anyway?”
A woman was sobbing. That was all she was doing, just sobbing. After a while the radio started to make a loud racket. I couldn’t even hear the woman sob. It stopped suddenly—in the middle of a note. I took a chance and stuck close to the door. From somewhere beyond the living room I heard Ben yell. “Turn that thing on, damn you!”
And then I got the woman’s words. She was talking to herself, flat-toned, monotonously. Her voice had a terrible sound. “He was—a good guy—he was—he never put me through—anything—he was a good guy—he was—”
Ben Garren cursed again, and I could hear him heading for the living room. I went down the stairs. The radio started when I reached the second flight. The blonde that Donelly had grabbed by the arm and invited to come down and look at Wirt Donner—she was up in Ben’s flat. And he had told me that he didn’t know a blonde—that he was off women. I knew that Ben was a liar.
I hailed a cab, named a small hotel not far from Broadway on Forty-sixth Street, and smoked two pills on the way down. Inside the room I stripped, lay on the bed, and talked to myself.
“Red didn’t pump Donner out. Maybe the blonde did—maybe she didn’t. If she did there was a reason. If she didn’t—there was still a reason. She knows a lot about it. She had a yen for Donner. Ben Garren knows that. Maybe he knows more. I think yes. It’s harder to figure Donner’s go-out than the other two. Maybe they’ll try to hang the
Dot kill on me yet. Maybe not. Steiner counts. Cherulli isn’t so hot in this—”
It went on for some time, and then I rang for the latest edition of three papers. Any three. I didn’t feel the gin much, and I was pretty tired. All three papers agreed that Cherulli had been mobbed down, and that he rated it. Donner got a few sticks—a cheap crook done in by a hophead. One paper stated that Salmon had confessed and had collapsed. The other two stated that he was being grilled. Dot Ellis was played up as an example of a Broadway butterfly. The police up the river expected to make arrests shortly. That was in the earlier edition of the first paper I read. The other two had last-minute flashes. Dot had committed suicide. After a more thorough search a twenty-two had been found shoved down behind the cab seat. A police surgeon was quoted as saying that one bullet had only scraped the skin—the one in the throat had been fatal, but she had had time to stick the gun behind the seat. Time and physical ability.
I laughed that off. It meant that the police were going to give someone rope. Dot wasn’t important, but they figured the killer was. The thing I couldn’t get was why they figured they could bluff Dot’s murderer into thinking they believed she’d committed suicide.
I switched off the light beside the bed, tried to sleep. Two hours later I was still trying. And I needed sleep. A fat-faced bellhop came up, and I gave him a ten-dollar bill and told him what I wanted. When he brought it I let him keep the change and drank half the bottle’s contents. It wasn’t good Scotch, but it was good enough to put me to sleep. The last thing I remembered was that Donner had said he had Scotch at his place. And so had Ben Garren. But I’d had to buy it myself in order to get it. That seemed sort of funny, but I fell asleep while I was trying to figure why.
3
GOOD GUY
It was late morning when I woke up. I had a small headache, but as it was the first one I’d had in more than two years it didn’t count much. The papers came up with the ham and eggs and coffee. The tabloids were playing Dot big—and they’d got wise to a lot of things. My picture was smeared around, next to Dot’s. They’d found out I’d been turned loose just before Dot had gone away from earthly things, and the flat-faced cab driver had talked. The chief of police of the river town was quoted as saying that I’d be in custody soon. He had some questions to ask me. My picture showed that I was tall, lean, and smooth-shaven. It didn’t show much else. Another tabloid had a close-up. I looked almost handsome. It was a silly picture. My lips were too full and my eyes too soulful.
I finished off the ham-and, drank the coffee, had a shower, and dressed. Then I went down and got the prison-town chief of police on the phone. His name was Baker.
“Malcolm Ourney calling,” I said. “I see by the tabs you’re looking for me. I thought it might be true, even if I did see it in the tabs.”
Baker told me that it was true. He asked me to come up the river. I said it had taken me two years to get down the river, but if it was important I’d come up.
“It’s important,” he said. “Murder is always important.”
I told him that maybe he was right, said I’d get up there sometime in the afternoon. I asked him if I was charged with murder, and he said I wasn’t. Hanging up, I bought cigarettes. Then I went downtown and saw Mr. Hall, of Hall, Wickersham, Dunlop and Burns. Mr. Hall acted embarrassed, said my uncle had been a fine man and that he felt it must have been merely an accidental and unfortunate circumstance that had involved me with Dot Ellis. He got me some cash, arranged that some of the money would be transferred to a convenient bank, worked a lot of platitudes to death, and shook hands with me. I went up to the Grand Central and waited for the next train upriver.
While I was waiting, walking around, Donelly strolled up to me. His face was as red as ever. He had his blue eyes smiling, but it wasn’t exactly a cheerful smile.
“Going away?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Going up the river to see Baker. Want to come along?”
He shook his head. “What happened up there is out of my line,” he stated. “And what happened up at that boardinghouse is all finished, and just too bad.”
I nodded. “Just too bad that the sniffer’s getting the works for something he didn’t start or finish,” I said.
Donelly watched the faces of the crowd with casual interest. He spoke almost carelessly.
“Salmon? We found him dead in his cell this morning. Soft, at that. Pleasant dreams to the end, eh? Better than getting the juice.”
I let that sink in. Red was dead, and Donelly seemed pleased.
“Sign a confession?” I asked, and kept my eyes away from Donelly’s.
“A real nice one. Fingerprints all over the rod, too. Well, nice trip, Ourney! I’m just up here to see the traveling salesmen come and go.”
I nodded. “It’s fun,” I said without any particular expression. “Out of the Third Precinct a lot, aren’t you?”
The quiet-clothes dick grinned. “It helps,” he returned. “Hope they let you come on back, Ourney.”
“Why?” I asked.
He moved off a little. “I’m all for reformers,” he stated. “S’long!”
The gates were opened, so I went through and walked along the ramp. Red Salmon was dead. They had a confession. A lot of dope and maybe a little third degree. I forgot about that and started to think about myself. I needed information on Donelly—he knew things. That could wait. Ben Garren knew my idea; Wirt Donner had known it. Someone had talked. But just where did Donelly come in? I couldn’t even come close to answering that.
Inside the smoker I grabbed a seat up front. There weren’t many humans aboard.
“Cherulli’s dead—and I don’t give a damn,” I muttered to myself. “Donner’s out, and Red didn’t do that. I didn’t do it to Dot Ellis. I do give a damn about both of them. It’s a dirty street all the way, but some of the debris is important—to me.”
I got to thinking about what I could do with the money Dot hadn’t gold-digged away from me. There were a lot of possibilities. But I decided that what I’d do with it would be a lot of fun. After that I dozed a bit.
2
Chief of Police Baker was a short, heavyset individual who talked very fast, squinted dark eyes over my head, smoked black cigars, and walked with a limp. His voice had a rasping quality. He started in by telling me that I didn’t murder Dot Ellis, and that she didn’t murder herself. I said that I knew one of his statements was right and that I guessed the other was right. He asked a lot of questions and I answered them all. He said that even if I didn’t think much of Dot, he figured it was funny I hadn’t climbed into the cab with her, after more than two years in the Big House. I got his point, but I just smiled. He said that he’d talked with Warden Collahan, and that it was his understanding that I was something of a noble soul. I laughed that off. There was a little silence, after which he squinted his eyes on my gray ones.
“Who killed Dorothy Ellis?” he asked.
I didn’t laugh at that. I really believed that the chief wanted to know, and thought I knew. So I asked another question.
“I’ve been in prison for more than two years—how should I know?”
“That’s how,” he returned. “You’ve been in with a lot of potential killers for more than two years. A lot of ’em came out ahead of you—and a lot came in after you.”
“I ran across damned few potential killers,” I stated. “I lived a secluded life.”
Baker smiled with his squinted eyes. He asked more questions.
“How about Herb Steiner?”
I expected that one. My answer was all set.
“He went outside ahead of me,” I reminded. “I didn’t know him very well inside.”
Baker nodded. He kept right on smiling.
“There were fingerprints on the twenty-two,” he said. “But they weren’t Steiner’s. Guess whose they were.”
I swore. Not with any ill feeling, however.
“Mine?” I suggested.
Baker shook his head
. I swore again.
“I don’t like the game,” I told him. “You tell me the answer.”
“They were Dot Ellis’s prints,” he said. “It was her gun.”
I sat back and thought that over. My first idea was that it might have been her gun, at that. My second was that it hadn’t been her gun.
“I’m telling you these things because I’m aware of certain conditions,” Baker said slowly. “The Ellis woman isn’t so important—but she was running around with a mob.”
I got the last statement, but I was more interested in the first.
“What conditions are you aware of, Chief?” I asked.
He smiled. “I talked with Warden Collahan about you. He knew something of your plans—he was quite sure you were not involved in the murder.”
I nodded. Collahan had done precisely the thing I had suggested he would not do. He had been trying to protect me, and he had talked. I looked at Baker and tried not to show disgust. Baker smiled cheerfully.
“I’m not saying that I think your interest in cheap crooks is worthwhile, Ourney. They’re weaklings. But if you can get to the big ones—help the police—”
I said slowly: “To hell with the police! I’m not interested in them—I’m interested in the breeders—the few who rope in the dumb ones, the weak ones—”
I checked myself. Baker looked hurt. I got up and forced a smile.
“Forget it,” I advised. “I was drinking strong liquor last night—a celebration. I’m a little shaky. I’m sorry Warden Collahan talked to you about my plans, Chief. They may not go through—”
Baker’s smile was hard. “That’s right enough.” There was an edge to his tone. “They may not.”
I looked down at him. He got up. He spoke slowly, quietly.
“You didn’t murder the Ellis woman, Ourney. Whoever did shot twice, under the cover of the traffic noise, when the cab driver was arguing with a truck driver. Then the killer shoved the gun in the fingers of her left-hand—got the prints, using cloth, of course. That was the mistake, Ourney. He got her left-hand prints, instead of the right. That queered the suicide gag.”
Green Ice Page 5
